Stephanie Rose Adams

It is true behind the cottage
you bowed beside half-split wood
at the start of winter
so never got to warming
the cottage

though what brilliant species
made its passage through the suffocating
god-thickened air you swung your arms in was not in fact a bird
junk blown from the bin—

though true enough
that the sanguine sweep shaped your gaze
a very delicate cloche
over the chokecherry trees
and lifted you of your ax
some plastic or another a phony bit of red blown up out of the bin—

rushing awe into the dammed up brooks
of your bunched self laboring
wondering

what bird what bird

sublimest aviary
there burst from your strongbox
and sweeping onward into blackness
as the furthering of comets.